Five pairs of handsA conversation with Christian Crumlish, on typesetters, AI, the jobs merging around us, and the work you would keep doing anyway.Photo by Karen Maes on UnsplashIn the early nineties, a couple of years out of college, Christian Crumlish went to work at Sybex, a publisher of computer books that Wiley later bought. A manuscript at Sybex went through a surprising number of hands before anyone could hold it as a book. The author typed it at home. An editor in the office read the pages, marked them up by hand and mailed them back, and the author typed a corrected version and mailed that in. Then the pages went to a person whose job title was literally “word processor,” and whose work was to type the whole manuscript into a Wang, a machine that did word processing and nothing else.From there the text went to the typesetters, who set the columns on a phototypesetting...